“I am familiar with the States,” he asserted, “although my travels in the States have not been extensive. I spent a winter in Canada while a comparatively young man; it was, if I recall correctly, the winter of 1882. Or was it ’83? Now I should know. Ah, I have it! It was ’83, and my certainty of this pertinent fact comes from the recollection that in ’82 I was in England, and I know this, because the year prior to that, which, if you will reckon, was ’81, I was detained in a village in South Wales, by a sharp attack of fever which was thought to have been introduced by the importation of French labor upon the occasion of—”
And so on. He never got there, but I did feel sorry for him, so I listened just as hard as I could, which is less trying where you can eat than at other places. He was having a splendid time, when Miss Meek cut in to question me.
“Student?” she boomed out, and she pronounced it, “Stew-dant.”
I felt pleased, and I wanted to answer nicely, but I had at least six inches of spaghetti in my mouth—I hadn’t meant to take so much but it kept trailing up, and I had to lap it in—and so I had to nod. I should have waited a minute before I let that pleased feeling get on top, because she shoved it right over a cliff by her next remark, which was, “Oh, my eye!” and she followed that with a prodigious groan. It wasn’t very flattering.
“But in a student pension,” began Mr. Hemmingway, “where the rates are lowered for others by the fact that practising makes the house—in some ways—less attractive, one must accept the handicap with grace. How well I remember in Vienna, when I, then quite a boy—let me see, what was the year?”
“No matter!” barked Miss Bannister, and then Miss Meek added something, after another groan, that interested me considerably.
“And two more coming!” she stated.
“Are there?” I asked quickly.
“I do not lie,” she answered frigidly, and I stammered out something about not having meant that she did, but that I was interested.
“Mees Leslie Parrish,” said Miss Julianna, who came in at the moment, after Beata who carried a big platter upon which were rounds of meat all wrapped in overcoats of cabbage leaves in which they had been baked, “and Mees Viola Harris-Clarke—”